Released in 1989 (wow, a whole twenty years ago) The Bridge – A Tribute To Neil Young boasts an impressive array of artists representing a wide swath of the, then, contemporary “alternative” music scene.  The set is culled from a fairly diverse pool of left of center talent including, but not limited to, Nick Cave, [...]

As I mentioned the other day, you can expect a good amount of Neil Young related posts leading up to the June 2nd release of the first installment of the bard’s long awaited/delayed Archives Series. This is a good thing. And to be honest it really doesn’t take much to come up with an “excuse” [...]

This being AD it is inevitable that there will be a myriad of Neil Young related posts on the horizon, what with the first volume of his long awaited archives set with a release date of June 2nd.  Last year TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe made an appearance in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married [...]

In comparing an original song to a cover, it usually makes sense to discuss the qualities that defined the original in relation to how the cover treats the material.   But so many of us obtain knowledge of a song in the backwards way – cover first – that it can be just as insightful [...]

I have my friend Adam to thank for turning me on to this Destroyer cover last October while staying at his home in Brooklyn…so thanks, pal. Destroyer’s 2004 LP Your Blues ranks as a favorite in Dan Bejar’s catalog, and “..Take An Airplane” is its cornerstone.  The below mp3 is Spoon’s cover, recorded live at [...]

If you were to pose the question of what makes for a good cover I would cite Whiskeytown’s late ’90s re-tooling of Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown.”  Yes, the group’s alt.country forbears Uncle Tupelo pulled a similar landgrab before them with their cover of the Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, but Whiskeytown take it a [...]

Context is everything. And sometimes it’s the mere shift of geography, the slighter or greater roar of the narrator that can make the biggest difference in a song. Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” is a legendary song all its own. Originally released on 1980′s Catholic Boy, “People Who Died” runs through a litany of deceased [...]